Framingham’s David Mash has followed a life of rewarding musical detours

Sunday

Nov 12, 2017 at 6:00 PM

By Ed Symkus Correspondent

David Mash recently retired from Berklee College of Music after a 40-plus-year career there. What began as a move from Detroit to study guitar at Berklee eventually blossomed into stints ranging from founding the Music Synthesis Department (now called the Electronic Production and Design Department) to becoming vice president for innovation, strategy, and technology.

In honor of his commitment to the school and its students and to the contributions he made to the art of electronic music, Berklee dedicated one of its state-of-the-art Electronic Production and Design (EPD) labs to Mash, even naming it after him.

“I was in a meeting, this past spring,” said Mash, 65, a Framingham resident. “It was getting close to the end of my tenure, and the president announced at the meeting, ‘By the way, I wanted everyone to know that we’re going to dedicate room B-58 in David’s honor, and we’re going to call it the Mashine Room. That was the first time I heard about it. It’s a tremendous honor and I’m very appreciative of the recognition of my work there.”

Mash had different plans all those years ago when he arrived at the school.

“I came to Berklee as a student in January of 1973,” he said. “I thought I would be there for a semester or two and then go out on the road and become a rock star. But in my second year as a student they invited me to be a teacher, which I did, and when I graduated I stayed on as a teacher.”

It was 10 years later when he started what became EPD. He also went through a lot of ups and downs in playing music, which actually started much earlier. Classical guitar lessons began when he was 7. A few years later, already an avid fan of pop music and “mostly into R&B and rock 'n roll,” he was getting proficient on electric guitar.

“That was 1963, the Beatles were beginning to be heard in America, and all of a sudden, people were looking for electric guitar players,” he said. “I had one, and an amp, and when I was 11 I joined my first band. The other members were in their 20s and 30s, but that’s how I got started as a professional musician – playing Beatles music in a wedding and bar mitzvah band.”

Other bands and genres followed, including the rock power trio Dark Horse in his late teens and, just after graduating from Berklee in 1976, the jazz-fusion group Ictus, which started to gain some recognition just as Mash hit a bout of bad luck.

“I had a cyst on a tendon on my left hand,” he said. "They had gotten rid of it with steroid injections, but because I’d been playing for many years with the cyst, it had torn up the tendon sheath, and the steroids made the sheath close up around the tendon. So, I couldn’t move my hand at all. I went in for a minor operation that was supposed to release the tendon, but the doctor slipped and cut the tendon wrong, and I lost the use of my left hand.”

Mash’s guitar-playing days were over as, it seemed, were the band’s.

“Ictus had just signed a touring contract,” he said. “I was the leader of the band, and when I found out I wasn’t going to be able play anymore, the management said if I wasn’t in the band there was no touring contract. So I had to find something I could play with one hand. At the time synthesizers were monophonic, and you could only play one note at a time. I thought I could manage that, so I bought a ARP 2600 synthesizer and sequencer. Three weeks later, we went out on the road, opening for Dave Brubeck. I learned about the technology really quickly, and created a musical role for myself that I could function at within the band, and I eventually became known as an electronic musician.”

More good luck followed, resulting in the next step of Mash’s career.

“I was playing synthesizers for a Peter Sellars production of ‘Mother Courage’ at the Boston Shakespeare Company,” he said. “Peter had designed the stage so that my head was visible to the audience but all my equipment was below stage. Bob Share, who was the provost at Berklee, came to a performance, saw me and knew me as a teacher. After the show he came up to me and said, ‘We need to be teaching this kind of stuff at Berklee; would you be willing to develop a program around it?’ I said sure, and I did. It was a great opportunity and challenge.”

Then the guitar reentered Mash’s life. An injury to his right hand sent him back to one of the doctors that had tried to save his left hand years before. With new technology and surgical procedures available, injuries on both hands were corrected.

“I got my left hand back in 1986, but I didn’t start playing guitar again until 1991,” he said. “Because when I first got it back, my career as an electronic musician was really in focus. In early 1991, I got the idea of taking up the guitar again and mixing the guitar back in with the electronic textures in the computer. These days I’m playing more guitar than keyboards.”

In his retirement, Mash has also been able to complete a just-released album of original compositions called “Seasons.” He’s also, on occasion, finding time to play live.

“I’m trying to get back into making music daily,” he said, “including performing and writing and recording. But right now I’m focusing on the next album. I’m already three tunes into it.”

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